When Adding Alternate Text to Linked Text, the Link is Disabled

If you are experiencing the loss of a link in a text object that you’re providing alternative text for, the problem is that you’re actually creating a new object. Once this new object is created, you just need to create the link again with the Link tool.

Alternate text is generally reserved for images, but it is an option for text because in order to create certain special effects on a text block, the text must be converted to an image. This is because special effects like rotating the text 25 degrees can’t be created with regular text in a browser. As a result, VSD will instead change the text into an image.

This is where alternative text, or “alt text” becomes useful; now that search engines and screen readers have no idea what the text is (since it is technically an image), the alt text serves as a way for these programs to have a “text-only” version of what’s in the image. Click here to learn more about alt text.

When you choose to include alternative text (an image-only feature) for regular text, VSD converts that text into an image. What happens now is a new object being created.

Because you now have a new object, certain attributes don’t apply anymore; the link that was attributed to that text doesn’t exist because the text no longer exists. Therefore, you just need to apply the link to the object again.

Here are some graphic examples:

You’ve created text, and applied a link to it, which draws a blue line underneath the text to show the viewer that it’s a link.

In order to include alt text, you open the Object tool and click “Allow advanced text”.

Once an advanced text value has been included, the text is converted to an image; in this case, the advanced text value is the alternate text shown here as “Alt Text!” At this point, though it looks the same, the text is now a new object — an image — and the link that applied to that text is gone.

The easy solution is to click the Link tool again and check the box next to “Create link”.